Remember the scenes of flowers and locals kissing tanks and thanking America? Followed by scenes of looting and a power vacuum? Remember the “mission accomplished” banner behind George W. Bush, prematurely wrapping up? The docu from the team behind “The Lost Year in Iraq,” “The Torture Question,” “Endgame” and “Bush’s War” traces the U.S. role from the 2003 invasion to the current mess. “Frontline’s” longtime producer Michael Kirk goes deep, recounting the history of missteps, bad suppositions, handing off of responsibility and simply wrong-headed decisions.

Interviews with policymakers, military and security officials piece together the continuing errors. “We were in a state of denial,” national security analyst Anthony Cordesman says. It’s dense, heavy viewing but necessary — and tragic.

PBS this fall will launch the second round of “Makers,” six new films dealing with women — in war, space, comedy, business, Hollywood, politics. Colorado’s Pat Schroeder is among those featured. In a clip, talks about “the good ol’ boys club” that was Congress when she was elected in 1973.

“Makers,” a collaboration with AOL, also features Geena Davis, Linda Wolverton (who wrote the screenplay for “Beauty and the Beast”) and director Ava DuVernay.

In “Makers,” Schroeder recalls when she sought to join the Armed Services Committee, and was vetoed along with Rep. Ron Dellums. “For the first time, they overrode a Chairman’s veto” and they were admitted to the committee. Then the chairman attempted to humiliate them by offering Schroeder and Dellums one chair between them. “Ron Dellums and I sat cheek to cheek for a rather long time.”

“The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” will air on PBS Sept. 14-20, a 14-hour, three-person biography. The two-hour blocks will be repeated each night.

The film begins in 1858 with the birth of Teddy, ends with death of Eleanor in 1962. It’s simultaneously a family history and a political history, with themes of love and infidelity, disease, mental illness and loss.

Ken Burns introduced co-producing partner Geoffrey Ward, who wrote the series’ accompanying tome. “I had polio when I was nine,” Ward said. “That particular subject got me,” he said, referring to his emotional appearance on camera.

It remains a mystery how these original one-percenters were able to so deeply relate to average working people. “These are well-to-do people who spent themselves in public service,” Burns said. “They shared a simple idea, we all do well when we all do well.” Their philosophy was a basic sense of fairness and an obligation to those less fortunate.

The film backs away from common interpretations of Eleanor’s reputed affairs with women, suggesting 19th- and early-20th century relations were different and intimacy in letters and conversation meant different things then. “The film sticks to the facts,” Burns said. “You don’t want to get into psycho-biography in any way.”

“You’ll have a sense, all the way through, of the extraordinary struggle (Franklin) had just to get through the day,” Ward said. “You are not a sentient being if you’re not moved by the sheer battle he fought everyday.”

“America by the Numbers” PBS Credit: Courtesy of Paul de LumenProducer: WNET

By 2043 the U.S. will be a multicultural majority nation. PBS will launch the first national series tracking these massive demographic changes, “America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa,” in October.

The eight stories in the first season range from Pacific Islanders in the military on Guam to Native Americans in North Dakota, African Americans and Latinas losing babies at alarming rates in Rochester, NY, and Cambodian youth in Long Beach, CA, who contradict the Asian American stereotype.

In the episode “New American Politics,” former refugees in Clarkston, GA, begin voting and campaigning for public office for the first time. A Somali candidate wins a seat on the all-white city council, in an area formerly a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan. The “Ellis Island of the South” reflects the changes going on all over the country today.

“We’re not trying to be broad, we’re focusing in on stories,” the journalist Hinojosa said. “We’re trying to tell these stories before we get to the point of crisis.” We have been living this story, she said, and she knows it as a Mexican-American, but it is now massive across the U.S.

How different is PBS from the rest of TV? The 14-hour Ken Burns “The Roosevelts” will go up online in its entirety the day after the first hour airs. It will air in two-hour chunks over seven nights.

“Downton Abbey” premieres Jan. 4, 2015. More “Downton” talk coming later today…the cast will be here for dinner.
And “Call the Midwife” will return in March. No date yet for “Sherlock,” they’re waiting to fit the stars’ schedules.

At her executive session, PBS boss Paula Kerger asserted it is vital to the nomcommercial network to experiment. She added that PBS finished sixth behind ESPN in the ratings even though public TV usually declines to discuss ratings.

At the risk of singling out a favorite child, Kerger said, “the most important work we bring to the American public each week is “Frontline.”

How to find the next “Downton”? It was “lightening in a bottle,” Kerger said, bringing people back to PBS who had drifted away. “The thing we can do is expand drama on Sunday nights.”

It’s a sign of the times: PBS will introduce a half-hour version of “Sesame Street” in September. Today’s busy preschoolers have no time to waste. For those accustomed to mobile, digital entertainment, an hour-long television program is so last century.

Effective Sept. 1, PBS announced, “the additional half-hour program will air on weekday afternoons on PBS stations, complementing the one-hour series that airs weekday mornings (9 a.m. on RMPBS). For the first time, selected full episodes of the 30-minute show will also be available for free online at pbskids.org/video, on the PBS KIDS Video App and on the PBS KIDS Roku channel.”

Citing the growing popularity of mobile devices, PBS Children’s Programming boss Lesli Rotenberg said PBS Kids’ reach is “growing exponentially… In just the past year, the number of users streaming video on the incredibly popular PBS KIDS Video App increased 34 percent.”

The abbreviated edition of the show will be a condensed version of the traditional show, with a “Street Story,” “Word on the Street” and letter and number “dance breaks,” but without features like “Elmo the Musical” or “Abby’s Flying Fairy School.”

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Gov. John Hickenlooper gave a thumbs up to “Civil War: The Untold Story,” executive produced by Chris Wheeler of Denver’s Great Divide Pictures, in an on-camera introduction for a local screening Tuesday. One reason behind his interest in the series: his great grandfather, Andrew Hickenlooper, fought as a Union officer in the battles recreated in the miniseries.

Disgraced reporter Jayson Blair is but one subject of “A Fragile Trust,” Samantha Grant’s probing documentary airing on “Independent Lens,” 9-10:30 p.m. Monday on RMPBS. Additional subjects are the changing media world in general, as print gives way to digital, the specific breakdown of the editorial system at the New York Times just when newspapers were at their most vulnerable, the role affirmative action may have played in the scandal, and what’s standard procedure for truth-telling in the age of electronic journalism.

The film, airing as part of PBS’ “Independent Lens,” is must-see for journalists, students of media and anyone interested in an in-depth postmortem of one of the most shameful chapters in modern journalism. Grant opens with the Times story that blew the whistle on Blair, who had plagiarized the story of an anguished mother of a soldier MIA in Iraq. Macarena Hernandez, who wrote the original story for the San Antonio paper, recounts her discovery of the word-for-word copying by Blair. (In one ironic twist, it turns out Hernandez had interned with Blair at the Times.)

More and more instances of Blair’s lifting details and entire sentences and paragraphs begin to emerge. An initially odd graphic device, using black-and-white animation to suggest Blair’s ashtray piling up with cigarette butts, for instance, settles down. And eventually the spare animation is cleverly employed to illustrate how, by pulling one thread of Blair’s work, entire stories began to unravel.

A group forms the Olympic rings during the closing ceremony for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014 at Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post)

When it comes to ratings for the Olympics Closing Ceremonies on NBC vs. “Downton Abbey” on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre, it’s all relative.

Sunday night’s Olympics Closing Ceremonies from Sochi on NBC was considered a low point for the network in terms of Olympics ratings. With a fraction of that audience, Sunday night’s season 4 finale of “Downton Abbey” on PBS was considered a major victory.

Nationally, the Olympics broadcast scored a 8.7 rating, 13 share with 15.1 million viewers, the lowest household rating for a Winter Games Closing Ceremony ever.

In 2001 media theorist Doug Rushkoff explained in the insightful documentary “Merchants of Cool” just how corporate marketers manipulated youth culture. Thirteen years and one social media explosion later, that story now looks almost quaint.

Time for an updated course in media literacy, with Rushkoff deconstructing how marketers are co-opting today’s youth and putting them to work to push products and brands via social media. He spells it out via a documentary on PBS Frontline: “Generation Like,” premiering Feb. 18 at 9 p.m. on RMPBS.

Watch the preview for Frontline’s “Generation Like”

Ads are coming at us ever faster, masquerading as “moments” or “shares” and opportunities to “like,” in the social media age, now that companies have mastered the art of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter covert marketing. He explains how they use the concept of “empowerment” as a lure to trick consumers, especially kids, into spending endless hours endorsing brand names. For free. These modern campaigns are carefully designed to look like grassroots, organic happenings. In fact, they are expertly timed and tested to push a calculated marketing message.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.